Fast humanoid robot collision-free footstep planning using swept volume approximations

Nicolas Perrin (1) , Olivier Stasse (1) , Léo Baudouin (1) , Florent Lamiraux (2) , Eiichi Yoshida (3)

1 LAAS-GEPETTO - Équipe Mouvement des Systèmes Anthropomorphes
2 LAAS - Laboratoire d'analyse et d'architecture des systèmes
3 CNRS-AIST JRL - Joint Robotics Laboratory

In this paper, we propose a novel and coherent framework for fast footstep planning for legged robots on a flat ground with 3D obstacle avoidance. We use swept volume approximations computed offline in order to considerably reduce the time spent in collision checking during the online planning phase, in which an RRT variant is used to find collision-free sequences of half-steps (produced by a specific walking pattern generator). Then, an original homotopy is used to smooth the sequences into natural motions avoiding gently the obstacles. The results are experimentally validated on the robot HRP-2.

Mots clés: footstep generation; motion planning; humanoid robots; obstacle avoidance

Domaines: Robotique [cs.RO]

Nicolas Perrin, Olivier Stasse, Léo Baudouin, Florent Lamiraux, Eiichi Yoshida. Fast humanoid robot collision-free footstep planning using swept volume approximations. IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2012, 28 (2), p.427-439. ⟨hal-00662550⟩